Cyber criminals target Australian networks

as posted here

By National Security correspondent Matt Brown

Posted 1 hour 0 minutes ago 
Updated 47 minutes ago

The Cyber Security Operations Centre found attacks on company information which turned out to have national security implications. (ABC News: Damien Larkins, file photo)

More evidence is emerging of sophisticated attacks by criminals and foreign governments on Australia's computer networks.

Government officials from the spy organisation ASIO, as well as federal police and computer security experts, have joined forces with the top-secret Defence Signals Directorate since July.

The Cyber Security Operations Centre has found attacks on company information, apparently conducted by organised crime, which turn out to have national security implications.

Their disturbing conclusions come as a US-based data industry group warns that most data centres, which hold information ranging from defence secrets to your personal health records, do not have policies in place to cope with a cyber-terrorist attack.

The centre has brought together experts safeguarding the business sector, police investigating cyber crime and their colleagues working in the super-secret realm of defence signals intelligence, out of their bunkers.

They have all been working under the one roof for the past few months.

The cyber security policy chief in the Attorney-General's Department, Mike Rothery, says they have already tracked attacks crossing those traditional boundaries.

"Information that comes in say from a law enforcement source but where it's determined that the threat may be an espionage case, that information is then passed across to ASIO to take the lead," he said.

"There has been an acknowledgment from intelligence agencies that some of the operations being conducted by intelligence services from overseas are targeting commercial information from the private sector, information that could be of strategic importance to an economy."

The police, spies and anti-hackers are working together because that is what their enemies have been doing for years.

"It's certainly being speculated that use of intermediaries is one way for intelligence services to be able to insulate themselves or make it harder to detect who it is that's behind a particular incident," Mr Rothery said.

"Even though you might suspect that it's an organised crime network that's seeking the information, it could be that they're putting it on the open market to the highest bidder and it could be another government that's ending up being the recipient for that information."

Jill Eckhaus, from US-based data industry group AFCOM, says many of the world's data centres, privately-run information warehouses, are vulnerable.

"Every type of data that you can think of is sorted in these centres, from military information, government information, personal information, credit card information," she said.

"These are the people that are in charge of safeguarding every piece of information in our lives. It can be scary if attacked."

AFCOM has just published an international survey, including responses from 16 Australian centres, which shows the industry is under-prepared for a cyber terrorist attack.

Only a third have factored cyber terrorism into their disaster recovery plans and only a fifth do training to prepare for such an attack.

"It doesn't matter how unlikely it is," it's exponential the damage that it can do to not just the corporation but your customers, and if it's a government data centre just think about the military data that we have," Ms Eckhaus said.

"It's just something that every single corporation needs to be prepared for."

Mr Rothery says a terrorist attack on a data centre is unlikely but his alternative focus is hardly more comforting.

He has been concentrating on defending simple software that could trigger a nightmare scenario.

"It's the type of software that actually remotely turns on and off valves and opens gates in dams and controls the power grid and so forth," he said.

A team of private sector workers, the fourth in the past three years, has just returned from training with the US Department of Homeland Security to thwart attacks on these critical systems.

The Government is confident they are learning fast but like the hacking tools and the viruses they deliver, their efforts are a work in progress.

as posted here